“Your ever affectionate and faithful,
“S. S.”
The wife’s was the stronger, more powerful mind, and with her sincerity and openness of disposition which impelled her to show everything she thought or felt, we have no doubt she often offended the irritable vanity of a man who, in small things, had a painful sense of his own dignity. Hers was too big a nature to nag and fight about trifles, and at the same time often too self-absorbed to remember how she offended the susceptibilities of others.
“To live in a state of contention,” she writes, “with a brother I so tenderly love, and with a husband with whom I am to spend what remains of life, would be more than my subdued spirit and almost broken heart would be able to endure. In answer to the second, I can only say that the testimony of the wisdom of all ages, from the foundation of the world to this day, is childishness and folly, if happiness be anything more than a name; and, I am assured, our own experience will not allow us to refute the opinion. No, no, it is the inhabitant of a better world. Content, the offspring of Moderation, is all we ought to aspire to here, and Moderation will be our best and surest guide to that happiness to which she will most assuredly conduct us.”
In the season of 1806-7, at Covent Garden, she played Queen Katherine seven times, Lady Macbeth (to Cooke’s Macbeth) five times, Isabella (Fatal Marriage) twice, Elvira twice, Lady Randolph once, Mrs. Beverley once, Euphrasia once, and Volumnia fifteen times. We see by this enumeration of her parts how she, and she alone, achieved popularity for Shakespeare.
The subsequent season at Covent Garden was uncommonly short, and extended only to the 11th of December 1807, when the Winter’s Tale was announced for her last appearance before Easter. As events turned out, it proved to be her last for the season. Immediately after the performance she went to Bath, where she spent six weeks with Mr. Siddons. He was so much improved in health as to make plans for the future, and declared his intention of spending a part of the summer at Westbourne. She left him, therefore, comparatively free from anxiety in February 1808. Within a month of her departure, however, he was seized with a violent attack of illness, and on the 11th of March expired. She immediately threw up her engagement in Edinburgh, and left for her London home. Thence, on the 29th March 1808, she wrote to Mrs. Piozzi:—
“How unwearied is your goodness to me, my dear friend. There is something so awful in this sudden dissolution of so long a connexion, that I shall feel it longer than I shall speak of it. May I die the death of my honest, worthy husband; and may those to whom I am dear remember me when I am gone, as I remember him, forgetting and forgiving all my errors, and recollecting only my quietness of spirit and singleness of heart. Remember me to your dear Mr. Piozzi. My head is still so dull with this stunning surprise that I cannot see what I write. Adieu! dear soul; do not cease to love your friend.—S. S.”
So ended the love story begun thirty-three years before.
Before the end of the year she resumed her cap and bells again, but had only acted on one or two nights at Covent Garden before it was burnt to the ground. How the fire originated is a mystery. Some said that the wadding of a gun, in the performance of Pizarro, must have lodged unperceived in the crevice of the scenery. Miss Wilkinson declared afterwards, that before the audience left the house she perceived a strong smell of fire while sitting in Mr. Kemble’s box, and on her way to Mrs. Siddons’s dressing-room mentioned it to some of the servants; they declared it to be the smell of the footlights. How complete and rapid the destruction was we learn by the following letter written by Mrs. Siddons to her friend James Ballantyne.
“My dear and estimable Friend,